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The first exterior shots of the spacecraft in the desert lake show the spaceship's hatch door already gone... before the astronauts blow it off with an explosive charge minutes later in the movie. See more...

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Taylor's first name, George, is never mentioned in the film. He is referred to only as "Taylor." See more...

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Planet of the Apes (1968) - 22 corrections

starring Charlton Heston (add more)

Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Sci-fi

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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An essential plot device is that the talking human doll proves humans were productive and creative before the ascent and takeover of the apes. This is absurd. We are shown repeatedly that the apes' entire society is based heavily upon the previous human one - this is a sneaky buildup to the end scene when we find out exactly why that is! So, in human society we have talking mice, ducks, rabbits, pigs, cats, dogs, snakes, elephants, fish, crabs: name the species, we have given them the ability to speak, walk upright, drive cars, in fact to adopt every human characteristic there is. Surely the logical assumption upon finding the talking human doll is that an ape toymaker created a talking human for the same reason humans created talking apes? [This is a question, not a mistake. The talking human doll is not a plot device; just something that Taylor uses to help prove his point. Dr. Zaius already knows that humans once ruled the planet; he was just stuck for an explaination of why the doll talked when he first saw it. Given time he would have postulated that apes created it, but was interrupted by the attack on the cave.]
Edit Corrected by BocaDavie
The wound on Charlton Heston's neck is never more than a little bit of red paint smeared on his skin. The plot suggests he was shot in the neck with a gun, explaining why he cannot speak to defend himself (though it was unrealistic, since he couldn't even utter any sounds). Understandably, this movie was made in 1968, so special effects and makeup were limited, though you would expect them to put more effort into the illusion of a gunshot, especially for something so critical to the plot. [If the bullet entered his throat and didn't exit (i.e. was lodged in his larynx) it would leave only a very small entry wound, and would prevent him from making any sound. Once the bullet was removed, even trying to make sound would be very painful.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
If any disaster were to occur such as what happened here, the Statue of Liberty would be the first thing to go. Yes, it stood up in Day After Tomorrow, but Roland Emmerich knew that it wouldn't in real life. In reality, the statue isn't all that strong; even in a gust of wind, the arm of the statue sways 8 feet from side to side. And yet all of the buildings are gone in whatever horrible disaster occurred, and the flimsiest structure in New York outside of a billboard is still standing. [So the statue couldn't have been encased in layers of ash like Pompeii? Gradually buried then uncovered in its current position for Taylor to find? It's been renovated a few times since erected, it couldn't have been structurally strengthened before the war? It's also possible that it's just the top half of the statue sticking out. It's highly unlikely, yes, but not impossible.]
Edit Corrected by Grumpy Scot
After resting from their encounter with the boulder, Taylor and Landon hang back a bit for some debating while Dodge hikes on ahead. Dodge from the top of a distant hill yells, "Taylor. Over here." Taylor and Landon rush toward him. The shot changes to Dodge moving down the hill to the base. Taylor & Landon come from behind the hill, descend down to where Dodge is now standing. Now, Dodge couldn't have spotted that tiny brush growth from the top of the hill: no dialog suggests their supplies included binoculars. He therefore had to have descended to the spot, turned around, ascended the same hill to shout to Taylor & Landon. So why wasn't there an initial set of footprints in the dirt to confirm Dodge's ascension up the hill? Furthermore, Dodge had just crested that hill when Taylor & Landon paused for about just 10 seconds of dialog, so there wasn't enough time for Dodge to run down the hill, see the brush, and then run right back up to yell. The events don't sync up with the time elapsed. [It is only about 50 meters from the top of the hill to the plant, which is dark green with small yellow flowers and sitting against a blank barren valley floor. Someone with good eyesight, like an astronaut, could have been able to recognize it as a plant from the top of the hill.]
Edit Corrected by BocaDavie Time
The raft was barely big enough for three people, so they wouldn't have been able to fit Stuart (and supplies) if she had lived. [You're assuming it was the only raft on board. Most likely they had 2, in order to hold 2 persons each plus supplies. One may have been damaged or deemed unneeded because of Stuart's death.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com Time
This film is based on a satirical novel by French novelist Pierre Boulle. The satire of the film was against institutions and people of the 20th century. [How is this trivia? Pierre Boulle's novel is listed in the credits as the source material.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
In the scene after the hunt when all the humans are being rounded up, we see a group of gorillas posing for a photo with there feet on a stack of dead humans. If you watch the scene unfold as the camera passes over the pile of people someone in the stack moves their legs just in time to be picked up by the camera. [The humans may not be dead, only dying.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
All of the evolutionary and geographical changes are supposed to have happened within a 2000 year period? It would take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years for those changes to occur, no matter what the nature of the catastrophe that had befallen the Earth. [In the fourth movie of the series, the apes had already been brought into the servitude of humans. They had been taught mundane duties such as filing, delivering messages, serving food\drinks and so on. Only the best and brightest were kept and the rest were executed. They had even begun to speak by the end of the fourth. Evolution had a nice helping hand from humans in picking the genetically superior apes. Once the apes were in control, they aided in the de-evolution of the human race (in the 3rd movie, it was shown that a group of intelligent, mutated humans did survive). As far as the geographic\climactic changes, we really have no idea what happened in that 2000 year period. How many nuclear weapons were released? Were there any other outside influences adding to the changes(meteors, earthquakes, volcanoes.)? Or was that even New York shown at the end? The statue of liberty may have been moved after destruction.]
Edit Corrected by Rlvlk
In the scene where Taylor is on trial, and first starts talking, the three seated officials assume various poses - the one on the left with his hands over his eyes, the middle one with his hands over his ears, and the one on the right with his hands over his mouth. A nod to the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys. [Not a "nod" but a very specific, and obvious, joke.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
This is a mistake between the first 2 Apes films. In the beginning of the first Apes movie as the ship is sinking Taylor looks at the Earth time chronometer and it says 11-25-3978 as the date. In Beneath the Planet of the Apes Brent tells his skipper that the year is 3955. They were following Taylor's trajectory and Brent does meet Taylor but according to the second film Brent got there 20 years earlier than Taylor. [The chronometer on the space ship could easily have malfunctioned, after all, the suspended animation chambers malfunctioned also. None of the characters is able to confirm the date, because first of all they didn't even know they were on Earth, and second, the apes calculated time differently than humans.]
Edit
At the beginning, when the hatch is blown on the ship, you can see both windows blow off the ship and a piece of the nose by the window almost blow off. Looks like the special effects department got a little carried away with the explosives. [It could have been the NASA engineers that built the capsule that put too much explosives in it or the surrounding structures could have been weakened from the trip.]
Edit
At the end of the movie when Taylor is shooting the Apes one of the chimps protests, and as he does you can see a hole in his costume, where you can see his Human thumb. [I have watched the entire ending sequence several times, zoomed in at every point where an ape does anything that even resembles a protest, and cannot find a human being's thumb. ]
Edit
Early in the movie right after the 3 astronauts run from the rolling boulder they are sitting down under another rock (taking a breather) and Landon is speaking to the other two guys. You can tell from the long camera shot that there is no way he could be speaking those lines with that kind of thought and emphasis because he is in the middle of wrestling with his backpack and sitting down at the same time he is supposedly making some grand observation about their predicament. [He flips his backpack off quickly, asks if they are okay, lights a cigar and then goes into his "grand observation". At no point is there a moment when you couldn't have been able to wax eloquently while doing the things he's doing. I also zoomed in on the entire scene and saw no instance of any audio/synch problem. ]
Edit
At the end of the movie, just before discovering the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, the horse and riders are traveling along the beach. If you look closely, you can see a parallel set of hoofprints in the sand. Apparently the surf didn't wash away the evidence of a previous take. [Those aren't hoof prints. That's the mark left by the water and bits of seaweed left by a higher tide.]
Edit
Amazing that the apes' dwellings are all carved out of rock, but they have a functional brass water hose fitting in the veterinary lab, and metal bars in the outdoor 'jail'. [Dr Zaius explains at the end "they" (the government) knows the true history of the apes and implies he knows the fate of man. How he used technology\science to kill himself. It is not a major stretch of the imagination to believe that the apes decided what technology to keep and which to discard.]
Edit Corrected by Rlvlk
Throughout the POTA movies, chimpanzees are portrayed as peaceful pacifists, while gorillas are prone to violence. Later scientific discoveries prove (at least in some respects) the reverse: while gorillas are the more peaceful apes, getting violent only to protect their families or territory, chimpanzees have been found out to eat meat as well, attacking and dismembering small animals and even monkeys. [But these are not today's apes, they have been through an evolutionary process and changed. We are not the same in behavior as Neandertals or Cro-Magnon man. Since gorillas are stronger and not quite as smart as chimps, they have been relegated to the more brute force roles and overtime become more militant, while the chimps being brighter and lingual have become less aggressive.]
Edit Corrected by Myridon
The astronauts should had immediately realized they were back on Earth, at the beginning of the movie, if they had only gazed at the Moon or constellations in the night time sky (even if it was the year 3978). Naturally that observation would have made that a different movie. [A comment is made very early in the movie about the thunder and lightning with no rain and how there is a strange luminescence but no moon, which would make the stars invisible too. The climate and night sky may have been drastically changed by whatever has happened in the years since they have been traveling.]
Edit Corrected by ChiChi
Wouldn't Taylor have suspected he was still on Earth, seeing as all the apes were speaking English? [Who says you have to be on Earth to speak English? In Star Wars, humans on other planets speak English. Also, The Simpsons has Kang and Kodos who speak Rygelian, a language identical to English. So, this doesn't count as a mistake.]
Edit
Early in the movie, Taylor yells for someone to "blow the hatch before the power runs out". The hatch is blown, and seconds later the power goes out. As everyone abandons the ship, Taylor looks over at the digital "Earth Time" clock to note the date (11-25-3978). With the power out, the clock obviously wouldn't have been illuminated. [As with modern VCRs, the clock could have had a lithium battery apart from the main energy source.]
Edit
The purpose of the four astronauts leaving Earth was to find a new planet and repopulate it--with just one woman? The next generation would consist of siblings and half-siblings marrying each other. [The mission was to explore the planet not to repopulate it. Taylor only mentions the girl because they lost their ship.]
Edit Corrected by Grumpy Scot

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